One dilly of a storm last night

Friday, 21 June 2013

It rained all morning yesterday, stayed cloudy in the afternoon, and then all hell broke loose in the evening. The wind blew, the rain came down in buckets, and the thunder and lightening were bone shatteringly loud. Emma was a wreck. I gave up trying to hear the TV, and it soon stopped receiving a DISH signal. Some surrounding areas got golf ball and larger sized hail, but luckily we did not.

I woke up about 5:30 this morning to no electricity in the rig. I’m not exactly sure when that went out as it was still working just before midnight. With a storm like last night and no electricity this morning, I always wonder if my hook up post got hit by lightening and fried the surge protector, or if everyone else has no electric also. 6:00 a.m. is a little early to go knocking on Steve’s door or Rachel’s door up in the bunkhouse.

So I sat outside with Emma for a while, and fixed the side of my screen house that got blown in during the storm. After a while, I decided to unhook the electric and start up the generator. It was time to exercise it anyway. It got a good workout for six hours as the temps increased. The rig sits out in the sun and it doesn’t take long for the inside to heat up each sunny day. I later found out that there were power outages in quite a few places, and the isolated refuge wasn’t exactly near the top of the list of places to get fixed.

No electric also meant no pump for the water well on the refuge. I was fine in the rig, but the staff had to drive three miles to the Chippewa picnic area if they needed to use the pit toilets. There are some advantages to being self contained. Shortly after noon, the staff was sent home for the day since they couldn’t work on their computers or even get the big garage doors open to get large equipment out.

I had planned to make a trip to Fargo, SD, today to see what interesting sights I could find there, but I didn’t really want to leave the rig with the generator running. It got up into the 80’s today, and Emma would have cooked inside the rig if I shut the generator off. Ah well, guess I’ll do that next week.

It was after 1:00 before power was restored, so I opted to just run in to Detroit Lakes to take care of some errands and grocery shopping. I was back by 3:00, but had to struggle with the heavy iron front gate since everyone had gone home for the weekend. It normally isn’t closed until after 4:00.

As I drove the 20 miles or so home, my mind wandered to comparing living in the north as opposed to living in the south. There is that well known ‘Southern Hospitality’ that can be found south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a good serving of that for the last almost two years. Now I’m once again experiencing that famous Minnesota ‘Nice’. There aren’t the automatic Yes, Mam’s and No, Mam’s of the deep south, but folks are just so cheerful and NICE here. Maybe it’s because they’re frozen into their homes for more than half the year. I don’t know.

In the south, the ya-all’s and slow drawls catch in my ears. Up here, there’s the rising lilt to the end of sentences, doncha know! Uf-duh, it’s hard to decide which place I like best. Guess I’ll just migrate north for the summer, and south for the winter so I don’t show favoritism.

The skies have once again clouded over this evening, and it’s as still as death outside. Not a leaf is moving. It gives me the eerie feeling that we may be in for another round of angels bowling in heaven and nasty lightening strikes again. I sure hope not.